The Future of the Internet

Josh Marshall points us to a piece in Sunday's Washington Post about changes that may be coming up in how we experience the Internet. I hadn't heard about this controversy, and when I went back to check, this article wasn't included in the daily news updates the Post sends out, so they may not think it's important, either, but it seems potentially explosive to me.

As it works now, most Internet carriers provide equal access to any Website. But if Big Business gets its way (and with the Bush Administration and a corrupt Republican Congress, why would we ever expect it not to?), that could change. Apparently the telephone companies that provide Internet access are looking to charge Websites to deliver their content--pages, audio and video streams, whatever--and those who pay will have priority access over those who don't (or who pay less). It's another potential profit center for the phone companies, and if we’ve learned anything, it's that you don’t stand between a business and its profit center. But if you think, "Fine, the phone companies are going to charge more, so I'll just get my Internet through cable," you're naive to think that other carriers won't follow suit. The cable companies already decide what channels they'll include on their cable TV service and what channels they won't, so it's hardly a stretch for them to extend similar choices to the Internet when there's money to be made.

Christopher Stern, identified as a media policy analyst with Medley Global Advisors, wrote the piece, and he says most people aren’t too concerned with the issue, but they should be.

Maybe you've never heard of this issue -- and if so, you're far from alone. In my job as a media analyst, I've been talking in recent weeks to lobbyists for some of Hollywood's major entertainment conglomerates. These are people who know that consumers' ability to download their studios' movies and television shows as easily and cheaply as anyone else's will be key to the studios' future profits. Yet hardly any of them were more than vaguely concerned about the potential ramifications of network neutrality.

But lately the issue, a matter of heated debate on obscure blogs and among analysts like me, has begun to attract the attention of the mainstream press. There are a couple of reasons.

One is that Congress is taking first steps toward updating and rewriting the Telecommunications Act of 1996, a key legal underpinning for media, telecommunications and Internet activity. This process, required by technological advances, will probably take a year to complete.

More dramatically, executives at AT&T and BellSouth got into the headlines recently with a series of audacious statements. In a November Business Week story, AT&T Chairman Edward E. Whitacre Jr. complained that Internet content providers were getting a free ride: "They don't have any fiber out there. They don't have any wires. . . . They use my lines for free -- and that's bull," he said. "For a Google or a Yahoo or a Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes for free is nuts!"

That's a business logic that won’t go away. Certainly Google, Yahoo, and various other Internet entities have business clout of their own, so it's not clear which side will come out on top, but expect a compromise of some sort. And however it shakes out, that's a compromise that will restrict the Internet as we've all come to know it.